Goodreads asked Daniel Schulof:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Daniel Schulof Several things got me interested in America's canine obesity epidemic.

First and foremost, my interest sprung from a desire to protect my own dog. He’s a Rottweiler and he’s the kind of dog who requires some daily exercise in order to behave like a polite member of society. And I stumbled upon some scary facts surrounding the canine obesity epidemic while I was surfing the Internet in an effort to find more effective ways to exercise him. Specifically, that (1) according to the Association for Pet Obesity Prevention, more than half of America’s dogs are overweight are obese and that (2) even moderate obesity is deadlier for a dog than a lifetime of smoking is for a human being.

And those facts stunned me. Americans are crazy about our dogs. As a nation, we spend tens of billions of dollars on them every year. We treat them like family members. And whether a dog becomes overweight or not is almost entirely down to its owner. We’re in almost complete control. So, in a way, you’d think that we’d all be doing our part to keep them fit. But apparently we’re not. And that fascinated me—it seemed like such an easy problem to avoid. It seemed like there had to be more to the story. So I set out to learn more.

And the deeper down the research rabbit hole I went, the more interesting the story became.

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